'Buckaroo', the debut album from New York songwriter Katzin, projects symbols of the mythologized American West -- cowboys, horses, vast deserts, rolling plains, ancient rock formations -- onto the leap from adolescence to adulthood in all its unsteady shine. Zion Battle broke ground on the album the summer after he graduated from high school. Together with collaborator and producer Max Morgen, he drove to Joshua Tree for a week of intensive recording. "By isolating ourselves, we were able to capture this raw creative energy,” Battle says. “It feels like we made a love letter to our childhoods." Surging with rolling drums, filigreed synthesizers, and guitars that flip from a whisper to a thunder roll on a dime, Buckaroo renders the beauty of North America through a deceptively nonchalant electroacoustic collage. “One of our main goals was to make the album sound like the desert,” says Battle. Elegiac and smoldering with hope, Buckaroo sticks with you: a perfect snapshot of a vivid time. "It’s a recording of a moment in adolescence as much as it’s a musical recording," says Battle. "I really think in 30 years I’ll look back on it and maybe cry."

TRACK LISTING

1. Tightrope
2. Anna
3. Wild Horse
4. Hope
5. Wake Up Ruben
6. Cottonmouth
7. Shortwave
8. All Hat, No Cattle
9. Cowboy
10. Buckaroo
11. Nantucket

Originally released in 2010, 'Forever Dolphin Love' remains a vital introduction to the strange and fantastical universe of Connan Tant Hosford. Following its release, Connan enjoyed a flurry of critical and artistic praise from the likes of David Byrne, Johnny Marr, Blood Orange's Dev Hynes and Charlotte Gainsbourg, with whom Connan is an ongoing collaborator.

There's a truly mercurial quality cast over the album, which is full of subtle idiosyncrasies that gradually reveal themselves after repeated listens.
'It's Choade My Dear' and 'Faking Jazz Together' are perfect slices of lightheaded psych pop, constructed around spidery hooks, pitter-patter percussion and slow, sinuous grooves. The title track acts as the album's centerpiece - an ambitious suite that clocks in at over ten minutes; slithering through funk-filled interludes and lush passages into one of the album's most frantic and memorable hooks.

TRACK LISTING

1. Megumi The Milkyway Above
2. It’s Choade My Dear
3. Faking Jazz Together
4. Quadropuss Island
5. Forever Dolphin Love
6. Muss
7. Egon Hosford
8. Unicorn In Uniform
9. Grampa Moff
10. Please Turn Me Into The Snat

Whether bending genres or collaborating with artists like James Blake, MGMT, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Connan Mockasin has always maneuvered in mysterious ways. After touring with the likes of Radiohead and Neil and Liam Finn (Crowded House), the R’n’B surrealist continues assembling a cult around his theater, nay spectacle of life.

'Caramel' boasts a unique brand of mutated, lustrous soul that was almost wholly self-recorded over a month in a Tokyo hotel room. Described by Clash Music as “a true cosmonaut of inner space, ” the album explores different regions of Mockasin's singular galaxy, guided by his truly adventurous songwriting that favors reconfigured pop structures with a skewed funk sensibility.

TRACK LISTING

1. Nothing Lasts Forever
2. Caramel
3. I’m The Man That Will Find You
4. Do I Make You Feel Shy?
5. Why Are You Crying?
6. Itʼs Your Body 1
7. Itʼs Your Body 2
8. Itʼs Your Body 3
9. Itʼs Your Body 4
10. Itʼs Your Body 5
11. I Wanna Roll With You

'Pequena Vertigem de Amor' — the third full-length in Sergio Sayeg’s expanding catalogue as Sessa — is not just an evolution in the São Paulo artist’s sound; it is a transformation. Like a camera lens slowly zooming out, Sessa’s records reveal a progression from the private, carnal and earth-bound erotic desires probed on 2019’s 'Grandeza', to an exploration of the limits and possibilities in relationships between people in love on 2022’s 'Estrela Acesa'.

With 'Pequena Vertigem de Amor', which translates to “Lil’ Love Vertigo,” Sessa’s view turns upward, to the infinite sky, catching glimpses of universality in the intimacy of becoming a father. Sessa says these songs “are a mix of personal chronicles and quiet meditations about life in the face of personal change, of experiencing something so big that you realize your insignificant size in space and time.”

This new perspective and reality remade his personal life and his connection to music: “For the first time I saw music move from the center to the side of my life.” The radical reordering of priorities presented fresh opportunities in his music. “In an interesting way, music became more mixed with my life,” Sessa notes, as he found ways to conjure melodies, lyrics and inspiration from the daily rhythms of life.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pequena Vertigem
2. Nome De Deus
3. Dodói
4. Roupa Dos Mortos
5. Bicho Lento
6. Vale A Pena
7. Planta Santa
8. Gestos Naturais
9. Revolução Interior

Its creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bon’s seventh record 'Michelangelo Dying' usurped the album she thought she was making. The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love, and in the process became a kind of exorcism. What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up — but which in doing so, picks at it too.

Musically, there is a continuation and expansion of a sound — a machine with a heart — that has taken shape over her last two records (2019’s 'Reward' and 2022’s 'Pompeii') as Le Bon has increasingly taken control of the playing and producing herself. As guitars and saxophones are pushed through pedals and percussion and voices are fed through filters, an iridescent, green and silky sound emerges, with flashes of the artistic singularities of David Bowie, Nico, John McGeoch and Laurie Anderson surfacing and disappearing below the waterline throughout.

What we’re left with is an ever-changing, continuous entity, a kind of song cycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, “each one a shard of the same broken mirror” — shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending on how it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, “No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos. I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching fora revelation or order to any of it.”

An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, 'Michelangelo Dying' knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. “The characters are interchangeable” concludes Cate, “but at the end of it all, it’s me meeting myself.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Le Bon's 'Michelangelo Dying' takes all of the bright, angular melodicism we've come to know from albums like Reward or Crab Day, and hides it beneath a shroud of swirling chorus and deep reverb. Like listening to perfect indie-pop under the surface of the sea. Lovely.

TRACK LISTING

1. Jerome
2. Love Unrehearsed
3. Mothers Of Riches
4. Is It Worth It (HappyBirthday)?
5. Pieces Of My Heart
6. About Time
7. Heaven Is No Feeling
8. Body As A River
9. Ride (featuring John Cale)
10. I Know What's Nice

So run the reels of The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored, Pedigo’s sixth studio album (and second for Mexican Summer) in the cinema of your ear; its script written in steel-string, its starring director a 28-year-old performance artist, politician, model, and fingerstyling maestro whose talent is as irrepressible as it is undeniable.

Pedigo has lived many lives, having been homeschooled in Amarillo, Texas by his truck-stop preacher father; run for Amarillo City Council in 2019, aged 25—as documented by Jasmine Stodel’s SXSW-premiering, PBS-acquired film Kid Candidate—and struck up pen-friendships and collaborative partnerships with the likes of Terry Allen, Charles Hayward (This Heat), Werner “Zappi” Diermaier (Faust), and Tim Heidecker. A move south from Amarillo to Lubbock in 2020 put a spark to the powder keg of his creativity. “It’s even more flat, desolate, windy and dirty – like being on Mars,” Pedigo observes. “It’s pushed me to create more because there’s not really much to distract.” The move produced not only The Happiest Timesand its predecessor Letting Go, but also an Internet presence that showcases a panoply of ever-more outlandish outfits and an effortless deadpan wit. Both the former and the latter helped parlay him into the fashion world, too, having walked the runway for Gucci and been photographed by Hedi Slimane.

Inspired by the tragicomedic legacy of National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney (in whose notes the line ‘These last few days are amongst the happiest I’ve ever ignored’ was found following his mysterious and untimely death), Pedigo embarked upon The Happiest Times with a no-shit aim: to create “the best instrumental acoustic guitar album of the past twenty years.” Though canonical works of comedy and music show their influence—the mournful beauty of Nick Drake, the puckish abandon of John Fahey—Pedigo by no means places their creators on pedestals; if anything pulling them from their plinths, smashing the alabasters, pocketing some pieces, gluing others back together upside down, or leaving them floating free.

How might Fahey have played in a Midwest emo band? Pedigo posits on “Nearer, Nearer,” while the specters of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn float somewhere above “Signal of Hope” – “the most British-sounding thing I’ve ever written;” an echo in an empty church. Pedigo flits through the cycle of songs, coiling and uncoiling like the mechanism of a clockwork bird on “When It’s Clear;” rambling, a tiny speck in the landscape, on “Elsewhere.” “Then It’s Gone” stands as stark as a leafless tree, guitar spilling a somber tale in its truest voice – and nowhere more than on the title track is Pedigo’s playing more affecting: regret and optimism balanced on intimate, intricate arrangement, as carefully poised as raindrops on guitar strings.


If the rolling strings of Letting Go planted and germinated the seeds, then The Happiest Times sees Hayden grow the flowers, admire their ruffles, and take newly sharpened scissors to the stems; turmoil and perfectionism and the gods of chaos driving the hand that holds the shears. “I want to create something very melodic, and then put it behind a barbed wire fence,” Hayden reflects. “If you’re gonna get this pretty thing, then you might get cut up trying to get to it.”

At their most profound, Pedigo’s spacious, pristine soundscapes communicate an essential truth about the pursuit of artistic perfection. Creating The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored was, he surmises, a process akin to “the dog chasing the mail truck – what do you do when you catch it?”

TRACK LISTING

1 Looking At The Fish
2 When It’s Clear
3 Elsewhere
4 Nearer, Nearer
5 Signal Of Hope
6 The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored
7 Then It’s Gone

Since the release of his 2023 record, 'The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored', Pedigo earned widespread critical acclaim, performed a stunning NPR Tiny Desk Concert, toured non-stop with the likes of Jenny Lewis, Devendra Banhart and Hiss Golden Messenger, and more. He then decamped on a 20,000-acre ranch at an artist residency in Wyoming to write his new album, which he’d later record in Ojai with Scott Hirsch and name for a “pretty devastating” episode of Little House on the Prairie from 1978. The resulting album, 'I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away', is the final installment of what Pedigo has dubbed 'The Motor Trilogy’ – his three latest solo albums, tied together by their vehicular Jonathan Phillips artwork. An innovator of the instrumental genre, challenger of the stereotypical, and son of a truck-stop preacher, Pedigo has crafted an intentionally maximalist, genre-resistant work of warped instrumental Americana on this release, which he calls “a micro-dose psychedelic album…as if somebody had cut up a tab of LSD and put on a Fahey record.” 

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: On his latest album Hayden's mesmerizing finger picked guitars conjure up images of dusty sunbaked landscapes and endless highways. A wonderfully evocative album, perfect for lazy Sunday listening.

TRACK LISTING

1. Long Pond Lily
2. All The Way Across
3. Smoked
4. Houndstooth
5. Hermes
6. Small Torch
7. I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma returns with 'Gift Songs', a deep distillation of touchstones and influences drawn from the natural world and his spiritual practice. Enlisting a brilliant cast of collaborators, and blending a rich sonic palette of guitar, modular synthesizer, and acoustic instrumentation and arrangements, Cantu-Ledesma illuminates a profound sense of humanity and transcendent possibilities across a suite of five sublimely minimal compositions.

Drawing its title from Cantu-Ledesma’s belief that music is a gift, a form of magic, born from specific conditions, rather than a singular conception, and as a nod to Shaker “gift drawings,” regarded as gifts from God to maker, the slow emergence of Gift Songs provoked in the artist how one might sculpt instrumentation and arrangements to invoke experiences in the natural world: “being amongst running waters, hearing wind through trees, or the rhythm of hiking to a vista with friends at twilight.”

The resulting sound, subtly influenced by Cantu-Ledesma's parallel practices as a Zen priest and a hospice worker, provokes a deep resonance with the landscape and rhythm of the seasons of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where he settled with his family four years prior, around the release of his last album, 'Tracing Back the Radiance', each movement, shift, and transition built from evolutions of microscopic change.

In conceiving 'Gift Songs', Cantu-Ledesma embraced the possibilities of openness and chance: allowing for the interplay of sounds to guide its course under the direction of the album’s collaborators: Omer Shemesh (piano, arrangements), Joseph Weiss (engineering, bass guitar), Clarice Jensen (cello), and Booker Stardrum (percussion). What emerged was a desire to work as acoustically, and environmentally attuned,, as possible, showcasing the humanity of the performers, and an unexpected love affair with piano and percussion, the rhythms and tones of which speckle across the album’s effortless flow.

From the shimmering clarity of arpeggiating piano that marks the album’s first few bars, quickly submerged in dense textures of rhythm and tone, 'Gift Songs' presents a sense of ambient grace: sonorities that dance outside of time and space, implying something far greater than themselves. Amounting to a deeply organic and introspective form of minimalism that emphasizes the distinct qualities and idiosyncrasies of each instrument and its player, 'Gift Songs' manifests as a series of conversant movements within a greater whole.

As the densities of 'The Milky Sea' subside, Cantu-Ledesma arcs into achingly exposed spaces, carved by sparse piano lines atop delicate chaplain organ drones that glacially unfold across 'Gift Song I', 'Gift Song II', and 'Gift Song III', before concluding with the rising glow of 'River That Flows Two Ways', an immersive, long-tone work for Hammond B3 and pump organs.

Refined and deeply emotive, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s 'Gift Songs' encounters the veteran, process-based experimentalist unveiling a profound meaning within the elegance of its lattice of sound, occurrence, and space.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Milky Sea
2. Gift Song I
3. Gift Song II
4. Gift Song III
5. River That Flows Two Ways

Charleston, SC-based artist Contour announces his new album and debut for Mexican Summer, ‘Take Off from Mercy’.

Working with the likes of Saul Williams, Mndsgn and co-producer Omari Jazz, ‘Take Off from Mercy’ documents a journey through past and present, night and day, denial and serene acceptance. Contour (real name Khari Lucas) envisions ‘Take Off from Mercy’ as an epic within the pitch dark of night leading to a cloudy resolution.

Our narrator is a prodigal son who must wander through the wiles of excess to approach grace; his journey mirroring that of the protagonist in Toni Morrison’s epochal third novel, ‘Song of Solomon’. To deepen these themes, Lucas is revealing the album in three portions - ‘Night’, ‘Evening’ and ‘Morning’. This phrasing reflects the narrative arc of the album while providing a broader sonic context to the singles. The cinematic scope of this voyage comes to the fore in the accompanying three-part short film directed by Lucas and T.V (Tshay, Vernon Jordan III).

‘Night’ drops us off in the dead of night. In the world of this album, a night can steer towards bliss or paranoia. ‘Theresa’’s loping breakbeat, soaring atmospherics and dream logic lyrics gesture towards the sublime, yet even here, there's a foreboding edge. “I’m dreaming of the last time I saw you dancing,” Lucas intones. “Silver linings each time, they hang me.” The subtle swells and countermelodies give ‘Theresa’ its floating, breathing quality. ‘Gin Rummy’, meanwhile, is more foreboding, a gambler's lament that sees our protagonist weaving a cautionary tale. Our hero “searches for heaven,” finds it, then lets it slip through his hands like sand.

Contour’s body of work is evidence of a restless curiosity that culminates on ‘Take Off from Mercy’. Starting off as a beatmaker, Lucas’s vision has broadened over releases like ‘Onwards!’, ‘Love Suite’, and ‘Weight’, spanning from sample-driven soul to covers of Strawberry Switchblade. On ‘Take Off from Mercy’, Lucas eschews samples in favour of guitar-driven songwriting, a move that immediately places him in a metaphysical conversation with a long line of Southern songwriters. “It immediately got me thinking about the itinerant Southern bluesman,” Lucas says. “The guitar as your only companion while traveling, the instrument as a tool to document your own story and carry on generational tales and traditions.”

When speaking about the blues, Lucas cites a line from New York emcee and producer E L U C I D on the provenance of the art form: “There'd be no blues if I was blameless.” Yet in the world of ‘Take Off from Mercy’, the blues are inescapable and we are bound by history, even if we’re under no obligation to repeat it. In the process of writing and recording ‘Take Off from Mercy’, Lucas toured constantly and began to understand underlying themes within his lineage. He discovered his father tried his hand as a musician before a period of wandering. His mother painted a mural that still rests in the Atlanta subway system. And Lucas’s ancestors crisscrossed from south and north and back again during The Great Migration. Our protagonist is still in motion, seeking an answer on some unknown horizon.

TRACK LISTING

If He Changed My Name
Now We’re Friends
Faith
Entry 10-4 (Mood Recipe)
Watchword
(re)Turn
Mercy
Ark Of Bones
Guitar Bains
The Earth Spins
Theresa
Gin Rummy
Reflexion
Seasonal
For Ocean

An album about his “love for Brazilian music and its many shapes and colors,” Sao Paulo-born Sessa’s debut 'Grandeza' set the scene for who The New Yorker called a “songwriter cut from Veloso’s mold and blessed with a flair for the intimate, the enigmatic, and the licentious.’ 

TRACK LISTING

1. Grandeza
2. Tesão Central
3. Gata Mágica
4. Flor Do Real
5. Sangue Bom
6. Dez Total (Filhos De Gandhy)
7. Infinitamente Nu
8. Orgia
9. Tanto
10. Língua Geral
11. Toda Instância Do Prazer

Flying Wig is an album of recurrent dualities; a can of paradoxes, a box of worms. The redwood and pine-surrounded cabin studio where Banhart was “constantly listening to The Grateful Dead” somehow birthed something slick, modernist, city pop-adjacent and Enoesque.

Banhart's eleventh record, it's the actualisation of a “precious friendship” with the acclaimed solo artist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and Mexican Summer stable-mate Cate Le Bon — a coming together prophesied by the mirror-image titles of their early solo albums (Banhart’s 2002 Oh Me Oh My to Le Bon’s 2009 Me Oh My) and a tenderness built on crude haircuts (“we finally met, soon after she was cutting my hair with a fork and that was that”) and home-made tattoos — but never previously translated into the recording studio.

“It’s about transmuting despair into gratitude, wounds into forgiveness, and grief into praise,” - the product of a ritualistic creative practice that melts down and re-casts as it mulls, the stuff of sadness beautified as it changes shape — culminating in a record that “sounds like getting a very melancholic massage, or weeping, but in a really nice outfit… if I’m going to cry, I wanna do it in my best dress.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A silk-smooth melting pot of neo-soul, woozy Balearic and city pop, all topped with Banhart's syrupy vocals. There are hooks aplenty, but they sit beneath waves of reverb-drenched keys, guitar and bursts of trill brass.

TRACK LISTING

1. Feeling
2. Fireflies
3. Nun
4. Sight Seer
5. Sirens
6. Charger
7. Flying Wig
8. Twin
9. May
10. The Party

After recently releasing the critically-acclaimed Plains album (I Walked With You A Ways) with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, Jess Williamson’s Time Ain’t Accidental is the sound of a woman running into her life and art head-on. With a vocal dynamic kindred to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, Williamson blends the emotional immediacy and story-telling of traditional country with the artful, wholly honest transmissions of songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Terry Allen. The album's reckoning with loss, isolation, romance, and personal reclamation signals both a stylistic and tectonic shift for Williamson: from someone who once made herself small to an artist emboldened by her power as an individual.

TRACK LISTING

1. Time Ain’t Accidental
2. Hunter
3. Chasing Spirits
4. Tobacco Two Step
5. God In Everything
6. A Few Seasons
7. Topanga Two Step
8. Something’s In The Way
9. Stampede
10. I’d Come To Your Call
11. Roads

Shake The Feeling: Outtakes & Rarities 2015-2021, Iceage's second full length for Mexican Summer, is a collection of non-LP cuts (or “misfit children,” as lead singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt describes them) from the seven years during which Iceage made Plowing Into the Field of Love (2014), Beyondless (2018), and Seek Shelter (2021). As with all of Iceage’s albums, whether it be the sensual daring-do of their dark-hardcore masterpiece debut, the Flying Nun-dappled “Oi!!!!” of You’re Nothing, the shift to cowpunk gothic romanticism on Plowing Into the Field of Love, or the space truckin’ gospel-rock of their most recent albums, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Johan Suurballe Wieth, Jakob Tvilling Pless and Dan Kjær Nielsen make the impossible seem effortless.

Hayden Pedigo is an acoustic guitarist and soundscape composer from Amarillo, Texas. Perhaps most widely known for his endearing bid for Amarillo city council at the tender age of 25, after his Harmony Korine inspired spoof campaign video went viral. Hayden's music is equally enchanting, combining the American primitive guitar picking styles of John Fahey with a proclivity for experimental sound design and manipulation.

By his early 20s, Hayden had already collaborated with luminaries such as Charles Hayward of This Heat, Fred Frith, Werner Diermaier of Faust, and outlaw country legend, Terry Allen. However it's important to expect the unexpected with Hayden Pedigo.

With album artwork that depicts black metal connotations and a sworn hater of the term "Cosmic Country", Hayden's satirical sense of humour extends from the various characters he portrays on his Instagram page and into every fibre of his being.

'Kid Candidate', a 67 minute documentary made about Hayden's Amarillo City Council bid (dir. Jasmine Stodel) will be digitally released on July 2 2021 by production company and distributor, Gunpowder & Sky. It made its worldwide film festival premiere at SXSW 2021 and will be released on blu-ray in September 2021. Music from Letting Go also features in Kid Candidate.

TRACK LISTING

1. Letting Go
2. Carthage
3. Something Absolute
4. Some Kind Of Shepherd
5. Tints Of Morning
6. I Wasn't Dreaming
7. Rained Like Hell

After an overwhelming response to the fifth anniversary edition of Cardamom Times in 2020, Weyes Blood’s (Natalie Mering) warm, elegiac early career record manifests once again in 2021 as an Indie Exclusive Edition on transparent light blue vinyl with purple and maroon splatter, only available from the artist and at independent retail worldwide. The reimagined cover art for Cardamom Times transports the viewer to a desolate, urban paradise during sunset — Jamaica Bay in Queens, New York. A couple is laying on the ground, caught in a comfort beyond time while surrounded by a rusting reality. Since the EP’s release, Weyes Blood’s Front Row Seat to Earth (Mexican Summer, 2016) and Titanic Rising (Sub Pop, 2019) were both named Best New Albums by Pitchfork, with the latter making multiple Best Albums of 2019 lists, including The Guardian, Pitchfork, and The Independent.

Different from these elaborate albums, Cardamom Times was recorded onto reel-to-reel tape at Mering’s home studio in Rockaway Beach, New York. The songs of Cardamom Times demonstrate Mering’s reverence of devotional music and the avant-garde, channeling the domestic hymns of Sybille Baer through the lens of Baltimore’s experimental DIY scene; the minimal, melodic drones of Terry Riley accompanied by the voices of the Sacre Coeur; the confrontational words of Anaïs Nin along with the warm embrace of St. Augustine. With Cardamom Times, Mering invites listeners into that space of love and longing, struggle and change, surrounded by the decay of time that perpetually embraces us.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Maybe Love
A2. Take You There
B1. Cardamom
B2. In The Beginning

"His songs sound like memories, as familiar as they are foreign. I’m addicted to this record.” - Cate Le Bon. In a time rife with alienation, Magic Touch, the third album by the ubiquitous and mysterious Jack Name, offers the comfort of contact. With a body of work that ranges from the catchy to the cacophonous, Name has earned the reputation of a musician who’s difficult to define. For over a decade, he’s been a fixture in the Los Angeles underground. His songs have appeared on albums by U.S. Girls (Heavy Light, 2020) and White Fence (Family Perfume, 2012); he’s produced recordings for Cass McCombs and collaborated with Ariel Pink; and his experimental music has been performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Magic Touch reveals yet another side of Jack Name. While it’s every bit as intricate as his previous releases, 2014’s Light Show and 2015’s Weird Moons, here he’s done away with the dense production of his earlier work to make a record that feels stark, personal, and effortlessly natural. With Magic Touch, Name brings his lyrical and conceptual focus away from the dream worlds of his first two albums and back to Earth: a simpler place, or so it seems, where humans are falling in and out of love, struggling with loneliness, reaching for connections to each other, and, for better or worse, affecting each other. In a year like 2020, it’s a place that feels familiar and far away all at once. The almost subliminal story arc of Magic Touch reminds us that touch itself is magic.

TRACK LISTING

1. Karolina
2. Do You Know Ida No?
3. Having A Good Time
4. A Moving-on Blues
5. I Came To Tell You In Plain English
6. Dudette
7. Losing My Way
8. Empty Nights
9. Kick-around Johnny
10. Sacred Place

• On vinyl for the first time since its first sold-out pressing in 2015, the fifth anniversary of Weyes Blood’s (Natalie Mering) warm and elegiac record, Cardamom Times, is celebrated with a deluxe Dinked edition.

• Since the EP’s release, Weyes Blood’s Front Row Seat to Earth (Mexican Summer, 2016) and Titanic Rising (Sub Pop, 2019) were both named Best New Albums by Pitchfork, with the latter making multiple Best Albums of 2019 lists, including The Guardian, Pitchfork, and The Independent. Different from these elaborate albums, Cardamom Times was recorded onto reel-to-reel tape at Mering’s home studio in Rockaway Beach, New York.

• The songs of Cardamom Times demonstrate Mering’s reverence of devotional music and the avant-garde, channeling the domestic hymns of Sybille Baer through the lens of Baltimore’s experimental DIY scene; the minimal, melodic drones of Terry Riley accompanied by the voices of the Sacre Coeur; the confrontational words of Anaïs Nin along with the warm embrace of St. Augustine.

• This anniversary edition of Cardamom Times features reimagined cover art with the focal image of a desolate paradise during sunset — Jamaica Bay in Queens, NY surrounded by rust. A couple is laying on the ground, caught in a comfort beyond time. With Cardamom Times, Mering invites listeners into that space of love and longing, struggle and change, surrounded by the decay of time that perpetually embraces us.

TRACK LISTING

01. Maybe Love
02. Take You There
03. Cardamom
04. In The Beginning

It's 2020, and everyone is exhausted. The world is falling apart, and then there's the day-today stress of just existing in the modern world. Keeping up with everything feels impossible, and we all feel that neverending push to always be productive, inspiration and motivation be damned. For NYC artist Photay (a.k.a. Evan Shornstein), none of this is particularly conducive to living a healthy existence, let alone being creative, but he's decided to face it head on.

Waking Hours, his second full-length (following 2017's Onism), is a meditation on time and, more specifically, our obsessive need to fill every moment with activity. "It's about getting back to a really simple notion of just celebrating your existence and not necessarily attaching this huge story of who you are and what you do," he says. "It's about finding comfort in just being." Photay's search for calm is at the very core of Waking Hours, and while he admits that making the album was therapeutic, it shouldn't be mistaken for some sort of healing ambient excursion.

The LP is largely electronic, but frequently verges on pop and extensively features Shornstein's own vocals. The music is intimate and inviting, but it also suggests that Photay is perhaps at his best when he's blurring genre boundaries. "I really truly love so many different types of music," he says, "and for this album I opened things up and gave myself the freedom to go anywhere."

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Existential Celebration
2. Warmth In The Coldest Acre
3. Is It Right?
4. Fanfare For 7.83 Hz
5. Change In Real Time

SIDE B

1. The People
2. Rhythm Research
3. Pressure
4. EST
5. A Beautiful Silence Prevails

CMON is the new recording project of Josh da Costa and Jamen Whitelock. Even as they established themselves as integral members of New York’s DIY scene with their band Regal Degal, da Costa and Whitelock were acutely aware of how closed off they had become. As Regal Degal mounted its final tour, with clubs pushing their set times earlier and earlier to make space for the DJs who followed da Costa and Whitelock took notes. “We were definitely getting swept further from where we wanted to be and the excitement we wanted to portray,” Whitelock says. “There’s such joy in going out and dancing that was completely missing in a lot of shows, especially in New York. Nobody wants to move, everyone’s too self-conscious. But when you go to the club, everyone’s in it—you just want to dance, and that’s all that matters.”

The community potential and the promise of physical liberation that came with dance music spoke loudly to both da Costa and Whitelock, and following the dissolution of Regal Degal, da Costa set up a new life for himself in Los Angeles—a steady relationship, a pet bird, a car —and got down to work with a copy of Ableton. Back in New York, his head spun by DJ Rashad, Whitelock was learning to program, too. They kept their line of communication open, and eventually Whitelock started making the cross-country trek to work and record with his old bandmate. They mined the sound they established with Regal Degal, applying their old band’s heavy atmospherics and melancholy soul to four-on-the-floor rhythm grids and smoothed-out guitar lines, taking production cues from EBM and AOR in equal measure. If Confusing Mix of Nations is a tour of anything, though, it’s not countries so much as psychic spaces.

Each of its ten tracks feels like a postcard from an aesthetic territory worth returning to. Opener “Coo” begins with locked-in grooves reminiscent of Drugdealer (for whom da Costa drums) or Mild High Club, until it suddenly gives itself over to a rhythm that’s been chattering away in the back of the track. As da Costa and Whitelock follow its hints, “Coo” suddenly inverts its priorities and sounds like Miami bass all leaned out for Halloween, then calmly returns to the opening groove, the only proof of the excursion an excess of delay on da Costa’s vocal. “Peter Pan” struts like it’s on its way to meet side two of Sandinista! in its verses, then glows with New Romantic shine in the chorus. The pop hooks on “Good to Know” feel like they could set off a festival crowd, but they’re offset by a strange hollow ache at the song’s center—a weird sadness that makes you feel a little bad for dancing to it.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A

1. Coo
2. Good To Know
3. Dreamfucking
4. Celluloid
5. Mindboggling

SIDE B

1. Peter Pan
2. Sam
3. Zoo
4. Base
5. Letdown

Soft Hell, Pill’s second full-length album, is a raucous, splintering dispatch from New York City, animated by the madcap ingenuity of a foursome finding a palpable sense of joy and play in expressions of caustic, black humour. Like the contradiction of the album title, which references our acceptance of everyday miseries, it’s a slew of dichotomies, a frenzied cutup. It’s bleeding saxophone and lustrous feedback sounding somehow pastoral, and winking hooks subtly infused with venom. Pill’s lyrics are severe and funny, cryptic and straightforward, but never didactic. They reliably interrogate power. Vocalist and bassist Veronica Torres, a poet and visual artist, has cited as influences J .P. 'The Big Bopper' Richardson and Ian Svenonius, apt references for her wildly expressive range. Atop the clattering rush of opener “A.I.Y.M.” she uses an ambiguous narrator to complicate gendered stereotypes, while “Fruit,” a coolly pulsing vamp, explores the paralysis of political anxiety. “What am I allowed to create or destroy?” she asks in “Power Abuser,” highlighting the inanity of needing to ask for permission. Pill resent complacency, whether in political or creative senses. “For me this band’s about being provocative with sound,” said saxophonist Benjamin Jaffe. Drummer Andrew Spaulding said the album title, Soft Hell, critiques the “work-to-play” cliché of New York life, with its breakneck, competitive pursuit of comfort. Torres added that it evokes sexual bondage, describing Soft Hell as a reference to the cyclical monotony of humans harming one another.

TRACK LISTING

1.Softer Side
2.A.I.Y.M?
3. Double Think
4. Dark Glass
5.Midtown
6.Fruit
7.Plastic
8.HaHa
9. Sin Compromiso
10. Power Abuser
11.Soft Hell
12. OK

Jassbusters is Connan Mockasin’s third album and first in five years. An unclassifiable, unconventional album that neither picks up from nor abandons the modes of 2013’s widely-embraced Caramel or its 2010 predecessor Forever Dolphin Love, Jassbusters foreshadows a five-part melodrama film titled Bostyn 'n Dobsyn, created by Mockasin.

Jassbusters soundtracks the unpredictable narrative of the film in eclectic, electric ways.

Whether bending genres or collaborating with artists like James Blake, MGMT, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Connan Mockasin has always maneuvered in mysterious ways. After touring with the likes of Radiohead and Neil & Liam Finn (Crowded House), the R&B surrealist continues assembling a cult around his theater, nay spectacle of life with Bostyn ’n Dobsyn screenings and Jassbusters performances throughout October and November 2018.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Smooth as silk, Connan Mockasin smashes out some softly sung utterances and syncopated jazzy flourishes on his newest LP for the excellent Mexican Summer. Weirdo R&B meets with shimmering lounge and almost-vertical soul in this thoroughly entertaining suite. Brilliant.

TRACK LISTING

1. Charlotte's Thong
2. Momo's
3. Last Night
4. You Can Do Anything
5. Con Conn Was Impatient
6. B'nD
7. Sexy Man
8. Les Be Honest

A reference to the Jungian idea of synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidences,” Cosmic Wink is as much a reflection on inspired companionship as it is a rebirth. Jess Williamson fell deeply in love, and then her life was uprooted; she left Texas for California, leaving behind the roadworn verses of her previous albums for brighter, bolder songwriting.

The Byrds-ian jangle of album opener “I See The White” airbrushes halos around the brain with an immortal pop hook. When Williamson asks her listener to “tell me everything you know about consciousness,” it’s an invitation down a two lane blacktop, both vessels heading the same direction.

The Rhodes-soaked “Wild Rain” begins with a ghostly air until a swell of synths gives way like the heavens parting. Williamson’s voice emerges from the clouds promising that she will “treasure your patience / from you I learned what it means to make a family.”

Concluding with “Love On the Piano,” Williamson’s new musical and lyrical mind declares “Love is my name now / Love, Darlin” over a revolving acoustic guitar line and lightly pressed upright piano notes. Vulnerability can feel something less vulnerable when love - true, deep love - creates a latticework to hang the frame of our humanity, which in many ways is the message underlying the entire album.

TRACK LISTING

1. I See The White
2. Awakening Baby
3. White Bird
4. Wild Rain
5. Thunder Song
6. Mama Proud
7. Dream State
8. Forever
9. Love On The Piano

On the Echoing Green is an elegant work of lush, shimmering sound, rendered with a singular touch by eternal electric romantic Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. In contrast to the haze and hermetic process of previous albums, Green was conceived as a deliberate experiment in clarity and collaboration: “I was interested in trying to bring out more overt pop elements, to let them come to the front and be present. I also have more trust now in letting things happen – trusting other people’s musicianship, and being open to people’s ideas. Eventually, things emerge.” What emerged from this bond are eight rapturous and richly melodic slow dives of swirling guitar, bass, synthesizer, piano, and drum machines, dramatically accented in places by heavenly arcs of voice courtesy of Argentinian singer-songwriter Sobrenadar. Cantu-Ledesma encouraged chemistry and intuition in the studio by beginning the album without any demos for reference; he and his collaborators pursued patterns and hypnotic textures across long-form improvisations until gradually songs began to take shape. This is music of growth and grandeur, of ascent and exploration, played with purpose and passion by a craftsman in tune with the beauty of sound and the harmony of light. In his words: “[This album] feels like spring – things coming alive, blooming, emerging from winter.”

TRACK LISTING

1. In A Copse
2. A Song Of Summer
3. Echoing Green
4. The Faun
5. Tenderness
6. Vulgar Latin
7. Autumn
8. Dancers At The Spring
9. Door To Night

Riding on a cloud of smoke, psychedelic travelers Shadow Band make sounds that move like foggy dreams from fantastical lands. Their patient but powerful songs set in motion a series of refracting echoes that call forth images of medieval battles, spirits unseen by human eyes, and the gentle, constant pulsing of the universe. The band formed organically around the songwriting of Mike Bruno, a quiet figure whose vibrant mental landscape is the center of the group’s orbit. Growing up in New Jersey, Bruno immersed himself in a self-made world of gloomy sonic alchemy, honing his songcraft as a solo act in New Brunswick's small-but-dedicated freak scene. The early years saw Bruno attracting a rotating cast of area heads around his growing arsenal of songs and dubbing it Black Magic Family Band. The sprawling web of artists varied with every gig and recording session, but the roots of Shadow Band started here. Sonically, the homespun production mirrors the communal environment in which they were made. Layers of murky instrumentation congeal into a singular sound, with strange stringed instruments, theremin vibrations and buried percussion all washing by as a solid alien texture. Songs melt into one another to the sound of distant birds and pagan pan flutes only to rise up in swells of unholy synth.

TRACK LISTING

1. Green Riverside
2. Endless Night
3. Shadowland
4. Eagle Unseen
5. In The Shade
6. Indian Summer
7. Morning Star
8. Mad John
9. Illuminate
10. Darksiders' Blues
11. Daylight

Convenience skids like a garbage truck with no brakes, barreling through passages of guitar chording bent at the wrong angles and ring-modded riffs aligning with Benjamin Jaffe’s expressive sax before splitting apart into chaos. Veronica Torres assumes double-duty between vocals and bass, while Jon Campolo plays three instruments in the live setting and Andrew Spaulding four, including circuit-bent noise rigs of their own invention. Veronica’s words are delivered with the speed and frenzy of someone with their life on the line, but she’s also able to slow things down in a gesture of dominance, confidence, and trust. This band is wise enough to know that safety is fleeting, so they take their digs when and where they can.

Given Pill's backgrounds, their music advances a notion of what the punk spirit of NYC might be: the capture and distillation of the energy and friction that comes from living amongst so many people in such a confined space. The idea seeds in free jazz and improvisation; reached adolescence in galleries and loft spaces in the ‘70s; found politics in squats and independent spaces; and it grows stronger the more these several sensibilities are practiced ands stewed. Call them No wave, post-punk, noise; they are immune, content to head off in a direction of their own design.

TRACK LISTING

1. 60 Sec.
2. Which Is True?
3. My Rights
4. Fetish Queen
5. Dead Boys
6. J-E-N-O-V-A
7. 100% Cute
8. Sex With Santa
9. Speaking Up
10. Vagabond
11. Love & Other Liquids
12. Medicine 

Union and Return is the third album from Luke Wyatt’s Torn Hawk. It was composed and recorded entirely by Wyatt at his home in Berlin and is inspired by painters like Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Caspar David Friedrich. Here. Wyatt parts the gauze that shrouded his former work to reveal a lush and ornate set of compositions -- elegantly orchestrated, awash in unguarded emotion.

Having spent years working with gritty production techniques, Wyatt seems refreshed and restored by the possibilities of definition and detail. Many tracks were initially composed on piano and then painstakingly fleshed out into final form. The feel is spontaneous, rather than labored, and the pieces possess an organic and grid-less grace. On album opener “The Romantic,” the flow of ideas is natural, seamlessly transferring melodies and themes from voice to voice, instrument to instrument. Orchestral arrangements give way to layered guitars, smeared pads and collaged digital detritus.

While the record luxuriates in subtle, delicate dynamics, Union and Return is just as disruptive as anything in his back catalog. Tracks like “Feeling is Law” and “Die Swimming in the Sea Here” supply a full-bore tenderness that can be uncomfortable, especially for those projecting a policed gruff or “masculine” image. This disruption is key to the music’s intent - gentle music as a tough gesture.

TRACK LISTING

1: The Romantic
2: Feeling Is Law
3: Borderlands
4: Thornfield
5: With My Back To The Tower
6: Friends & Family
7: Scene On A Staircase
8: Our Knives
9: The Archers
10: To Miss The Mark
11: Die Swimming In The Sea Here 

Plaza is the third album by Quilt; a name implying a meeting place, a crossroads, a coming together. In the space of ten songs, Plaza clarifies Quilt’s musical stance of a congregation, mixing folk, pop-psych, and wanderlust into a common ground where each form takes on the characteristics of one another to create something wholly satisfying, styles and sentiments hand in hand, the purest and sharpest distillation of Quilt’s group aesthetic to date.

On Plaza, Quilt has pivoted their sound on a new foothold. The guitars shimmer, squawk, warble, swell, and tense up. The organs and synths flow in the background as mood-enhancers. The drums dig in a little deeper. We hear flutes and harps, a string quartet, grand pianos and Casios, feedback and distorted violas. Among all these sounds the group’s shared and solo vocals showcase some of the strongest lyrics and hooks the band has made to date.

Plaza showcases a tighter, more concise version of Quilt, particularly as the members have learned to encourage each other’s strengths and allow each other to confidently exist as distinct voices cooperating within a very intimate creative space; their songcraft has tightened up, their singing now crystal clear, vis á vis personal experiences of loss, frustration and isolation.

TRACK LISTING

1: Passersby
2: Roller
3: Searching For
4: O’Connor's Barn
5: Eliot St.
6: Hissing My Plea
7: Something There
8: Padova
9: Your Island
10: Own Ways

Acting as a respite from the celebrated strains of modern Australian underground music, Lower Plenty manage a deconstruction of folk music like none other: unsettled, unforgiving, unconcerned with what came before or what’s to follow. Acoustic guitars shuffle in and out of phase with one another, double-tracked vocals hover above in careful meter, brushed snare rattles the very frame of their sound, and then everything shifts again, and again. Comfort’s not long here, though beauty is maintained; melodies start sweet but turn inward, wane nostalgic and wax without resolve.

Life/Thrills is the Melbourne group’s third full-length, and their collective experience will leave you thoroughly unprepared for the beautiful confusion suggested by these ten songs, which seem to have the power of slowing and even stopping time. Suitable comparisons to this music are as disparate as early Cat Power, Arab Strap, the Shrimper roster ca. 1992, the Sun City Girls, and the late ‘60s/early ‘70s output of the Red Crayola, but as with much truly original music, Lower Plenty resists direct comparison and defies expectation. Their shambling, discordant presence will relieve you of any preconceptions – this is one best experienced alone, as the sun fades into the horizon for the night.

TRACK LISTING

1: Waiting On A Tram
2: Calculations
3: Life/Thrills
4: Took A Trip
5: Concrete Floor
6: On The Beach
7: Jealous
8: Go Down
9: You Pushed Me
10: Lots Of Lows

The legacy of North Carolina’s Ashrae Fax seems destined to be appreciated in retrospect, in no small part given to the tremendous power of the group’s 2003 release Static Crash!, reissued twice from its initial CD-R run before appearing on Mexican Summer last year.

The Goth/ethereal duo of vocalist Renée Mendoza and producer/guitarist Alex Chesney had built a long, strange and mostly undocumented legacy prior to that release, and Never Really Been Into It extends the tale back even further: ten songs, sketched out in the late ‘90s, most of which were never completed and remained unheard until now.

Rescued from a shoebox of ephemera from the band’s earliest days, when Mendoza and guitarist Alex Chesney drifted out of high school and into the uncertainties of early adulthood, these songs were the product of a band whose members had nothing but time and ambition, influence and desire to transcend their humble beginnings. Pieced together and re-recorded in 2013 by Renée in her home studio, from mere stems and forgotten takes preserved on decades-old minidisc recordings, the songs reflect disquiet, uncertainty, absolute beauty, along teenage obsessions with The Cocteau Twins and The Cure, refracted through the lens of latter-day experience – pristine musicianship, gorgeous vocals, cryogenically frozen until now. Had these songs been properly released when initially conceived. First new record in over 10 years

For Fans of: Lush, This Mortal Coil, The Cure

TRACK LISTING

1: Dreamers Tied To Chairs
2: Chkn
3: The Big Lie
4: Fits And Starts
5: Decaax
6: Hurricanes In A Jar
7: You Make Me Question My Mind (In A Thousand Words About Time)
8: Intexus
9: Seconds Chances
10: In Motion

Both formats include a free CD bonus disc "Unstrapped", featuring 4 tracks.

The Soft Pack are back with 'Strapped', an adventurous album that finds the Los Angeles-based foursome breaking with expectations and exploring the possibilities of how they can push their sound. In making it, the group took to heart a quote from the sage Pasadena thinker David Lee Roth that goes something like: “The first rule of rock & roll is if it sounds good, it is good.”

The Soft Pack’s history begins in 2007 when Matt Lamkin (guitar/lead vocals) and Matty McLoughlin (lead guitar) started a band in their native San Diego. By the following year they’d added David Lantzman (bass) and Brian Hill (drums). The four of them soon moved up to LA, went on a bunch of tours, and coalesced into The Soft Pack.

Following the two and a half straight years of touring that came both before and after 2010’s self-titled release on Heavenly Recordings (Kemado Records in the US), the band were burnt out but determined to take control of their future. They decided to self-produce their follow-up, which will be released by Kemado’s sister label Mexican Summer. During the previous sessions for their self-titled album they developed 12 songs and recorded all of them - 10 of them made it to the album, the other two became B-sides. In contrast, while making Strapped they created 80 demo ideas, recorded 30 full songs, and then picked their 12 favourite ones for the album, no matter how far out they were.

The group also took their time while making Strapped, making it over the course of two years. This pace allowed them to integrate new ideas and approaches into their existing sound. The Soft Pack’s pop rock foundations are undeniably still present - nine of the songs don’t break three minutes and from the first seconds of glorious album opener “Saratoga” it’s obvious they haven’t abandoned the fuzz. That said, they’ve also spent a lot of time listening to Denim, Momus, The Church, YAZ, Grace Jones, INXS, Carole King, Lee Hazelwood, The Byrds, and Elton John. “Bobby Brown” is an icy new wave number, whose saxophone solo is just one of several horn appearances on Strapped. For “Head on Ice,” they layer on the dark atmospherics and capture a spiraling sense of doom. Maybe the most surprising cut on Strapped is album closer “Captain Ace,” a jubilant space cruiser that jams out to nearly the seven-minute mark…. Enjoy the ride!

TRACK LISTING

1. Saratoga
2. Second Look
3. They Say
4. Tallboy
5. Bobby Brown
6. Chinatown
7. Ray’s Mistake
8. Oxford Ave.
9. Everything I Know
10. Head On Ice
11. Bound To Fall
12. Captain Ace

Bonus Disc Tracklisting:
1. Cruisin' Bruce
2. Densmore's Gone
3. Haven't Got The Means
4. You're Fine

From Houston, TX comes Pink Playground, a new band that makes videos instead of playing live, and runs in the tradition of shoegaze and ethereal sounds right back to the earliest Jesus and Mary Chain demos. Guitars, synths, otherworldly vocals and drum machines collude to the proto-noise pop moment of the mid ’80s, and charges forth as if the band’s members were born to play in that vein. Ear-splitting volume and spun sugar melodies fill the space with pink pollen blizzard dynamics so thick and hazy you might need a dust mask to power through them, songs so sweet that they sting, manners inverted into a new form of aggression.

Graham's first release since the dissolution of RTFO Bandwagon, the elegantly primitive Columbus, OH folk band that most recently released "Dums Will Survive" (March 2009) on Texas' Dull Knife Records. While RTFO Bandwagon heavily reiterated the elements already present in Graham's guitar frameworks with the bass, drums, and even the vocal melodies, Swarming Branch takes a more delicate approach. Throughout "Good Word", each instrument plays only one note at a time, freeing up space in the mix and ensuring that every note is intentional.

To realize this detailed new sound, Graham brought in drummer Ryan Jewell (Terribly Empty Pockets, Pink Reason, Psychedelic Horseshit) and piano wizard Dane Terry. A number of other musicians come and go over the course of the record, including bassist Chris Burney (the Sun) and experimental composer Larry Marotta on slide guitar.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
I Stole The Lime
Seasonal Delicacies
Red Light Green Light Is A Game For Schoolchildren And I Can't Believe We're Playing It Still
Meatloaf At The Steakhouse
A Little Bit On The Way Out

Side B:
A Little Bit On The Way In
Take It Easy On Kathy At Least She Can Dance
The Grindstone Kid
Fenwick Island Update